If you think about Amazon, Alibaba is similar in China, it is the largest internet seller of goods and to increase sales they created singles day. In a similar fashion Amazon created Prime Day to boost sales and have “better sales for consumers” and to take advantage of it, consumers need to be on their platform. In 2020, according to Josh Horwitz of Reuters, Alibaba sales for its post-COVID-19 Singles’ Day was $74 billion.

The Singles’ Day event is the world’s biggest sales event or even bigger than the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday events around Thanksgiving.

This year Alibaba increased the number of days Singles’ Day ran and the $74 billion was spent on 16 million discounted items. More than 340 companies including Apple, L’Oreal SA and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd exceed 100 million yuan in sales with 13 brands recording Gross Merchandise Volume above 1 billion yuan.

In a poll before Singles’ Day, Sina Entetainment found that 4% of the 191,000 people who responded expected to spend more than 10,000 yuan compared to 43% who aimed to spend less than 1,000 yuan.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, retailers are always trying to make consumers spend more money and making up reasons or allowing someone to rationalize their decisions easily is a good thing to do. In the US someone made up Valentine’s Day and it has morphed into expectations of receiving something. It is what retailers do and as public we buy into it. For your investments which appeal to the consumer, what do the consumers buy into?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.